The Los Angeles Police Department has its own Eye of Providence, a 20-foot-long flat-screen mosaic in a windowless downtown control room fed by dozens of info?streams, including the police scanner, CCTV feeds, YouTube, Twitter and criminal databases. When crime occurs, it shows up as a blinking alert on a yards-wide video map designed by Palantir, the deep-analysis software startup out of Silicon Valley with a $20 billion valuation. Its brainiacs are prized for their ability to find needles in haystacks for three-letter agencies around the world.

Matthew Tamayo-Rios built much of that map while at Palantir, but the 29-year-old computer scientist switched teams a year ago to start Kryptnostic, whose potentially groundbreaking data encryption could stymie the police and intelligence agencies from finding any needles whatsoever. At the heart of Kryptnostic’s offering is something called “fully homomorphic encryption,” a chimera in security circles until now.